The Garden Within | SHELACH שְׁלַח־לְךָ - Portion 37

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Teachers of Torah have coined the Hebrew term PaRDeS (פרדס – a word literally meaning “garden” or "orchid") to refer to a four-tiered system of biblical interpretation, which reveals that each word, verse, and story in the Bible could be simultaneously understood on four different levels.  

Through this year-long course, we will explore the very words of God from these levels of the garden.  The name The Garden Within was chosen for this teaching series because it adopts the PaRDeS system of learning and because it delights in the spiritual pleasure through reaching new understandings and being pierced by lightning flashes of the intellect. The pleasure gained, of course, also refers to the nearness we feel to God when learning His Word.

One of the primary goals of The Garden Within is to demonstrate that the “stories” in the Torah are not merely one-time occurrences, temporal incidents undergone by specific individuals long ago. Rather these stories are archetypal in nature, reflecting or representing various physical and spiritual energies ever present in all aspects of reality and within each and every person.  That is, the Torah is deeply personal and speaks directly to each individual reader for where they are in their life.  So, come, take a walk with God in the Garden of the Torah!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

All right, good evening, everyone. Air of Tov. Welcome to the Garden Within this week as we continue our study in the Torah, especially through the parades perspective, that garden perspective. And we find ourselves in the book of Sefer Bamed Bar, that is the book of Numbers. And this week is the portion that deals with the spies. And so a very significant portion, a watershed moment for the children of Israel, that kind of seals a generation's fate out in the wilderness. I'll except for two, that would be Joshua and Caleb. But we'll talk about where we're at in the Torah portions and so forth after we get started with the blessing before the study of Torah. So let us pray. Baruchata Adonai Elahenu Melakwaelam, Ashekidishano Bomisfitav, Vesevanu le sokbidivre Torah. Blessed are you, Lord God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with his commandments, has commanded us to be immersed into the words and the matters of Torah. Amen. All right, so the Torah has 54 portions, and this week brings us to portion number 37. The portion is known as Shalach. It covers Numbers chapter 13 through 16. And again, this 37th reading from the Torah, Shalach. Shalach is an imperative verb in the Hebrew, and it means to send out. In its noun form, you get shaliach, which comes into Greek as apostolos, which comes into English as apostle, to be a sent one. And so in this particular portion, you're going to be getting the idea that Moses is sending out twelve apostles, right? And so you can already begin to see some of the foreshadowing there. The portion is named Shalach because of the first few words of the second verse of that portion. Numbers chapter 13, verse 2, that says, Send out Shalach for yourself men so that they spy out the land of Canaan. And then the Torah reading goes on to tell the tragic story of how these spies return with a bad or a negative report about the land of promise. And it influenced the rest of the congregation of Israel to then rebel against Moses and ultimately, of course, to rebel against the Lord. And so God then consigned the generation of Moses outside of Joshua and Caleb and their families to wander in the wilderness for 40 years. And so it seals their fate to be in the wilderness for a generation. So that is kind of what the portion is about. You know, and when we look at these portions, you know, we always want to do so with the idea that they speak to the times and we want to live within the times, that they are still relevant to us as believers and followers of the Messiah, that they still speak insight into our daily lives, that they still have purpose and meaning as the divine, inspired and errant word of God given to us and for our edification and instruction. And so one of the things that uh will help this week as you read through the portion, as you read through it through the rest of the week, or meditate upon it, or pray about it, or think back upon it, uh, and that we're gonna focus in on tonight. In fact, all of the sections that I'm gonna do tonight, they're all talking about the same thing. Uh I'm just gonna be turning it over and really kind of looking at it from a different angle, kind of like uh a diamond, 70 faces of a diamond, right? Just shining the light on the same diamond from a different angle, maybe see a different face, a different reflection of it, but it's the same jewel. Uh, and so they're all the sections are really tied together. Uh, so that might help you see a theme running through them. But what would be important for you if you're looking for like what is the spiritual energy of this week's portion, it has to do with the two of your senses, specifically the senses of seeing and the sense of hearing. So it's about seeing and hearing, uh, and how those two senses are very uh, you know, how how important a role they play in our everyday life? How many times a day do we make judgments and judgment calls and responses based upon either what we hear or what we see? Um, but then at the same time, uh, how many times are we led astray by what we see or by what we hear? And how often do those two things uh get crossed, where what we hear isn't necessarily what we think we're seeing, or what we're seeing maybe isn't jiving with what we think we're hearing and so forth. And so these two senses come together, and we're gonna talk a little bit about that. I'll introduce why those two senses are important. It's because of where the incident of Moses sending out the spies, what month of the Hebrew calendar that occurs in, and when they come back. Uh he sends them out 40 days, so it's not they're gonna go out and come in in different months, right? Because no month has 40 days. Uh, and we know from the calendar when they go out and when they come in. And so each month has a sense that it's attached to, and I'll tell you where we get that from and so forth. But those two months are attached to these senses. And so that begins to be something for us to think about and maybe think about in our own life, where we need to think about uh how we see things uh and how we hear things and how we integrate the two, and and even on a deeper level, biblically speaking, what does it mean to see, right? You know, Jesus did a lot of miracles, but a lot of his miracles were about healing blind people or healing deaf people. Well, it wasn't just Jesus was doing miracles to show that he could do miracles or that he had power, his miracles were never about that. And so giving sight and giving hearing had deeper implications. So, what are some of those connotations? So, those are all kind of things to be thinking about um in the portion. Uh, and we're gonna uh tie it together and I'm gonna talk about just different ways the portion deals with that, different perspectives. And yes, I get to use an undergraduate. Uh, you know, I was a mathematics major, abstract math, uh, because I don't like numbers, but and math was my worst subject. So that's why I actually chose mathematics to be my major. I felt that nothing should be able to conquer me. So I chose abstract mathematics because abstract mathematics at least doesn't deal with numbers. Um, and those were my worst grades. And what I excelled in, and what I took a ton of classes in, and all my electives and all that was things in the humanities. And so all my math professors are like, you know, you're you really, my advisor especially was like, you know, you really should probably switch over because you really stink at mathematics, you know, and all my philosophy professors and literature professors and so forth were like, why don't you come over here? Like you seem a lot more comfortable over here, and you you kind of stink at math. But uh, and so tonight I get to actually use some of that philosophy that uh I secretly was in love with in the math department, uh, some of the great philosophers to kind of put a different uh angle on it. Again, it's the same concept, but for those who maybe like to, as I put in their wax philosophical or who speak that language, uh uh we'll we'll hit it from that side as well. Um for those who would rather not go down the philosophical trail, don't worry, we got other angles for it. So looking at uh the text here, I want to look at kind of the opening set of verses here in Numbers chapter 13, uh verses 1 and 2. It says, And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Send men to spy out the land of Canaan, right? So they're coming out and they're gonna they're looking forward to taking the land of their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God tells Moses, you know, you need to send some people out to check out the land that I'm gonna give to the children of Israel. So now I want to talk about this idea of hearing and seeing uh from the concept of what's known as the Shema, as well as what's known as zitzit, which is mentioned in this week's portion. And I apologize, I meant to bring my zitzit with me to class tonight so you could see them in person. But zitzit are the uh fringes, the tassels uh that go on the four corners of the garments, often will have one blue thread in them uh that they are instructed, uh the children of Israel instructed to have tied on the corners of their garments. And that's going to be connected to this idea of hearing and seeing. And the Shema comes from Deuteronomy chapter 6, uh beginning in verse 4. It's uh if you think about it in terms of kind of Christian vocabulary, it would be the closest thing, though it's not exactly the same. I'm just trying to give you a kind of a close parallel. The closest parallel that um an Orthodox Jewish faith would have of a creed, a statement of faith. And so, Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Shemma Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad. Uh, and so that is said two times a day, at least in the morning and in the evening. Uh, it's something Jesus uh would have said twice a day, the apostles would have said twice a day, uh, they would have participated in that um tradition in that prayer life. Anytime they were in a synagogue or anytime they were up on the Temple Mount for a festival, uh, they would have said the Shema. And there's a certain tradition about that they no doubt would have observed that goes with how you say the Shema, what you do physically when you say it, so that you truly hear it, you do something to adjust your sight. And so there is this again connection of hearing and seeing, a theme that we're going to be running through this whole portion this evening. That's my angle, and I'm trying to do it from a variety of perspectives. All right, so the portion of Shelach recounts the story of the spies in the wilderness. Uh, they go on essentially a reconnaissance mission to assess how habitable the land is. Their trip, which happened over the entire Hebrew month of Tammuz and ended tragically upon their return to the camp on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, lasted a total of 40 days. It was on that disastrous day of their return, the ninth day of the month of Av, known in Hebrew as Tisha Baav. You might want to write that down if you're one that likes to go a little further after the Torah class, or if you're one that likes to Google check me and so forth. Tisha T-I-S-H-A, and then B apostrophe A-V. Tisha Baav. That means the ninth day of the month of Av in Hebrew. Tisha Ba'av. That's when they return to give their negative report, that they felt at least 10 of the 12 felt that these Israelites were not strong enough to conquer the various peoples living in the land, which caused the majority of the people, the critical mass of the people, to cry that they would just assume return to Egypt, be slaves, live in bondage, and die there. The Talmud in Tractate Ta'anit, Folio 29A, records that God was so offended by the people's lack of faith that he said in response, You wept needlessly that night, therefore I will establish it, meaning Tisha Ba'av, as a night of weeping for future generations. And if you research that, you will find that is exactly the case. It is a fascinating look at how many tragic events have happened to God's people on the ninth day of the month of Av, Tisha Ba'av. Um, not just things like both temples being destroyed in Jerusalem, um, but also uh pogroms in the Middle Ages, all the way up to events uh related to the Holocaust. Uh all throughout history, you will find Tishe Baav to be this very sad day. And in fact, it is an official uh commemorative fast day. So many people are familiar with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as a fast day. Tisha Ba'av is another biblical fast day. Zachariah talks about it, for instance. Uh, and so uh because it commemorates chiefly uh from the biblical perspective the bad report of the spies and the destruction of the two temples, uh, those become the major biblical motifs around it, uh but also historically many other things. Now, according to a book called the Sefer Yetsi Ra, uh that Seifer Yetzi Ra means the book of formation, which is one of the oldest known books in history, not just in Judaism, but meaning in history. It's one of the oldest known books. It is attributed, uh, no way to prove this, of course, but it is really, really old. But it is attributed to none other than Abraham the Patriarch. Um, but it is a really, really old book, and it describes a lot of uh things like the months of the Hebrew calendar and things like that. And one of the things it does is it describes for each of the months of the Hebrew calendar a sense that's associated with it. And one of the senses that's associated with the month of Tammuz is sight. So when they were sent out, the month that they were sent out, the sense for that month was sight. Uh where the month of Av, the month where they returned, that sense, according to Sefer Yetzirah, is hearing. And the spy's faculty of sight was only able to see the land of Israel on a very superficial level, while the people's hearing was blemished by their willingness to listen to the spy's negative report and then accepting it at face value without question. This already gives us some practical advice. That is, um it's incumbent upon us when we hear negative speech that we don't just look at it as neutral or just pass it off as like, eh, that's just so-and-so being so-and-so. If we listen to it, knowing it's negative speech, and we listen to it, and even if we give it credence and begin to let it shape our thoughts, right, then uh this is a bad thing. And this is exactly what the people did when they began to hear a negative report, and we'll eventually get into that's why Caleb will even not let them finish their report, because he understands that it's coming from a superficial level, and it's not coming from a position of faith, and it's not coming from a position of truth. It's coming from a position of fear, it's coming from a position of negativity, and it's coming from a position of faithlessness. And so he's saying we shouldn't even be listening to this, because by just even listening to it, it can corrupt us. And so it's clear in both cases that the spies were not seeing deeply enough, and the people were not uh hearing correctly. Their hearing lacked discernment. And from this perspective, we can see an aspect of the text, again, that's applicable to us as readers today. And that is, it is clear that the rectification, the tikkun olam for the episode of the spies, is for each of us to learn to see beyond the surface of reality, as well as to listen in a manner that truly enables us to understand the implications of what we're actually hearing. And so one place where sight and hearing come together in a very profound way is in the Shema. That part of the Bible that is traditionally said by those who follow a Torah lifestyle twice a day. Uh, Deuteronomy 6.4, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Again, a cardinal statement of faith in the Torah world. Um, those who recite this want so much to see the truth and want so much to experience and know God in a real way, that the tradition in when you recite this is that you close your eyes. And you not only close your eyes, but you cover your eyes with your hand as well. And so when you say the Shema, you will literally do this. You close your eyes and then cover your eyes, even though your eyes are closed. Then you will say, Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elahinu, Adonai Khat. And I want you to think about that. Think about how many times in life that that is a natural response to you. How many times when you are really concentrating, or when you're really drawing back on memory, or when you really need to connect to something that your instinct is to close your eyes. Right? Because you are thereby wanting to make sure that your sight is not going to interfere with the truth, right? And you know how your sight might therefore lead you astray. And so the reason that this is the posture for uh saying one of the most profound, deeper prayers of the day is because the closer something is to us, the more we have to close our eyes to see it. Because it's part of another reality beyond ours. And so if we want to see that deeper reality beyond ours, sometimes we have to shut our eyes off to this reality. Our good friend of the class, Rabbi Shlomo Karlbach, taught that this is why when individuals go in to kiss their beloved, it intuitively is upon us to close our eyes. I don't know if you've ever thought about that, but the next time you go to kiss your beloved, pay attention. Do you close your eyes? Maybe if you do, go ahead and do a peek and see if your beloved is closing their eyes, right? Uh but Rabbi Shlomo said that is us subconsciously saying, I don't want my physical eyes to blind me to the true vision of our inner love and our inner unity, that our bond, our becoming one, if you will, is beyond this reality. And I don't want anything in this reality to cause that to be in doubt. So I will shut this reality out. And so when we kiss, and you read Song of Solomon, it describes the kiss of the beloveds, right? That there's nothing like that, that that is in fact uh two souls coming together in unity, right? You close your eyes intuitively because you know it's a different world and you want nothing to interfere with that truth. And that same dynamic applies when you say the Shema, for at that moment we want to unify with our God, with our Creator, our ultimate beloved. And so the hearing, if you will, of the Shema. It's not only a physical hearing, but it is an understanding on a deep soul level. And the full implication of the oneness of God, which is not just that God is one, but that essentially all of reality is also one. And the connection between seeing and hearing and both the Shema and the sin of the spies, it's further showcased in a placement of passages or passage in this week's portion concerning the tzitzit, the fringes on the corners of the garment, the ritual fringes, that comes at the very end of the portion shalach. It describes the sin of the spies, and then you're given this portion on the zitzit, but it helps explain why it was added in that place and why the sages put it as when you say the Shema, Deuteronomy 6.4, you also then follow that up in the prayer with this passage from the book of Numbers, chapter 15, verses 37 through 41. And I'm going to read it, but notice how it will talk about sight here. And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak, so we got hearing, right? Speak to the children of Israel and tell them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, to attach a thread of blue on the fringes of each corner, and they shall be to you as zitzit, and you shall look upon them, and remember all the commandments of God and fulfill them, so that you will not follow after your heart, or after your eyes, so sight again, by which you will then be led astray, so that you may remember and fulfill my commandments and be holy to your God, for I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God. I am the Lord your God. So here we see in this passage the message of Zitzit is actually a tekun. It's a rectification, it's a repair for the sin of the spies, following after their hearts and after their superficial sense of sight, which caused them to forget God's promises, God's commandments, God's word, and especially his promise to lead them successfully into the land. And in regard to the Shema, the passage about Zitzit and its emphasis on not being deceived by one's eyes is reflected again in the custom mentioned about closing and covering one's eye while reciting the Shema. So you close your eyes and you cover, but also part of why they were to have these fringes is, you know, it's kind of like tying a string around your finger, that idea. When you see the string around your finger, you're supposed to go, oh, I'm supposed to remember something. And then you're supposed to remember what you're supposed to remember or why you have the string around your finger, right? They're supposed to look at those strings. It's one of the things that sets them apart from the nations. Other nations didn't do that. And they're supposed to go, oh, oh. And those strings, that's why I wanted to bring them, the way they're tied and all of that using Gematria, tell a story. You know, it has eight knots, you know, or I'm sorry, it has uh eight, eight threads with five knots, which is 13. 13 is echad in Hebrew, one. Uh, and then the number of loops you do it is 26, which is God's name in Hebrew, the number. So it actually spells out God is one, which is the Shema. So it spells out the Shema on that. And so when you look at that, you remembered the Shema, you remember Deuteronomy 6.4, you remember your identity, you remember who you are, you remember the word of God, you remember the promises. And then, as the text says, then you won't be superficially led to follow after idols and the things of the nations, and you won't be superficially led to follow after what your eyes see physically in this world, but you will be reminded to go back to see beyond this reality. And so again, there's this connection of seeing and hearing in the text. Now, let's wax a little philosophical here and see that seeing and hearing become connected with ideas like facts and values, and how seeing and hearing and facts and values and all of these things become inseparable and ultimately entwined. Now, the task at first seems quite explicit. Moses instructs a select group of tribal leaders to go and conduct a scouting expedition of the promised land. They are to observe carefully and they are to return with factual data that will allow Israel to plan the best approach for them to enter the land. Twelve individuals are selected. And Moses enumerates the facts they need to amass. So in Numbers 13, verses 17 through 20, we have go up there into the Negev and on into the hill country and see what kind of country it is. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak? Are there few or many? Is the country in which they dwell good or bad? Are the towns they live in open or fortified? Is the soil rich or poor? Is it wooded or not? So the assignment calls for compiling extensive lists of information. But something gets confused in the process. Instead of sticking to the facts, the spies decide to return with an assessment. They come back with more than just the facts, ma'am. They come back with their personal opinion. So Numbers 13, verses 32 and 33 are in that area. They say, the country we traversed and scouted, it's one that devours its settlers. And all the people we saw in it were Nephilim in Hebrew. They were giants, they were descendants of Genesis 6. They are descendants of when the sons of God mated with the daughters of man. They are semi-human, semi-godlike creatures is what they said. We look like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked like to them. Now, God and Moses are simply asking for some information, just the facts. In the words of the Rosh Bam, all this kind of information was needed so that ultimately they could know how to take with them the right tools to lay siege to things like fortresses and so forth. But the spies allowed their opinions to intrude, and then they kind of came back with a little bit of, you know, well, you know, a little bit of gossip. Like, you won't believe it. And then it's like, well, maybe should we believe it? Like, I don't know. Like this sounds a little more than facts. Were were they, were you really like a grasshopper, or were they just kind of like three inches taller than you, right? Were grapes really the size of for us basketballs? Or did they just have a lot of grapes? Like, were they really basketball-sized grapes? Like, are you telling us the truth there? Right? They came back with tales, right? They came back with opinions. Um and that, therefore, when the people listened and they listened superficially, it had disastrous response. That they look like grasshoppers to themselves, and so they must have looked like that to the inhabitants, even though they were spies and the inhabitants didn't see them, it demonstrates subjectivity. A sentiment designed that was designed to dissuade the people from further advance. You see, that was their motivation in telling the story. They wanted to tell the story in such a way that the people would say, No way, Jose, we ain't going in there. So they didn't just tell the facts. They told them in such a way to influence the people. They weren't asked to do that. They weren't asked to be generals and give their assessment. And so it has appeared for many generations of readers: fact versus opinion, objective versus subjective, is versus ought. The spies crossed the line by offering the latter, things like opinion, subjective, and ought, when what was called for was the former, fact, objective, is. In reading the spies through this filter, we stand on the shoulders not only of some of the greater Torah commentators, but also on two of the greatest Western philosophers, David Hume and Emmanuel Kant. One of the great tools developed by modern philosophy is distinction, suggested first by Hume and then eventually made a cornerstone by Kant, a distinction between facts and values. The dichotomy of fact versus sentiment for Hume, or the distinction between the synthetic and the ethic for Kant, was elevated to a metaphysical principle. Hume had his famous insistence that you can't derive an ought from an is. He used this principle, dichotomy to try to delegitimi uh to delegitimize religion, to delegitimize theology in any attempt to make ethics religious, rigorous, and normative. Kant used the same dichotomy to save ethics for respectable conversation, but at the price of content-filled revelation or ritual. More recently, prominent philosophers have begun to dismantle the wall of separation. It's not that there aren't some statements that are factual and some statements that are feelings. It's just that the two categories are rarely mutually exclusive, or that they're rarely hermetically sealed from each other, as maybe some previous philosophers had imagined. And so you have the philosopher W. V. Quine, who notes, quote, the lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our own sense and organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones for that matter. So rather than admitting a principled dichotomy that separates fact from convention, convinc convention, values from ethics, Quine argues for their interplay and fusion. Hilary Poultman, another philosopher, insisted, valuation and description are interdependent. Too many modern thinkers attempt to portray the world in two distinct columns. Objective, which they equate with reality, facts, and truth, and subjective, which they see as beyond any norms, discussion, or evaluation. But Putnam opposes the dichotomy. So let's revisit Moses' instructions through this new prism, which insists that the very act of identifying and articulating facts rests on interpretation, imagination, and emotion, and the process of an intuiting emotion or imagination rests on information, reason, and perception. The objective and subjective meet and mingle in the human dance of thinking, feeling, and doing. Each is participating in the dynamic as a whole, and each is reshaped in the process of contributing to the total shape. The facts that Moses seeks are really expressions of comparison, relationships between things, not things in and of themselves. People aren't strong or weak objectively. They are only strong or weak in comparison to other people. Few or many is a comparative assessment depending against whom you measure. A country is good or bad only relative to other countries. And so it goes. And each of Moses' factual categories is inextricably mingled with values, relationships, and comparisons. And so Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Coates remarks this. What the scouts reported was factually correct, but it was not the truth. The truth is not necessarily as things appear, but stems from the depths of the heart, from the sources of one's faith. Truth and faith go hand in hand, and a person does not acquire truth easily and by a superficial glance. Recognizing that human life is not a distillant of objective fact, but a swirling dance of fact and value, of objective and subjective, of outer and inner, all intermingled and interpreting one another, allows us to recognize the proper relationship of brain to heart, of brain and heart to soul, of brain, heart and soul to body. And all of them together form the unity that is the human being. And all of them together create the ways in which we come to know the world around us. And so as we become scouts, and as we scout the world around us, and as we explore the inner depths, the key is to bring unity to what seems it is separate. To see in the many the one. We'll bring it back down. A different spirit. Numbers 14, 24. But my spirit, or my servant Caleb, because he has had a different spirit and has followed me fully, I will bring him into the land which he entered, and his descendants shall take possession of it. So the Lord spared the children of Israel. But he punished them by consigning them to 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. He declared that they would never see the promised land that they had rejected. They rejected it. They said they would rather die in Egypt, so God said, Remember the power, including of negative words. Oh, you would rather die than enter that promised land? So be it. So be careful what you say. Words have power. Positive words have power, negative words have power. And so he says, you will never see the land because you rejected it. Not because I'm cruel, not because I'm just this arbitrator punisher, right? You yourselves, with your own words, have rejected it. So their bodies would be buried in the wilderness. Their children, though, would be privileged to enter the land. Even Moses, Miriam, Aaron were included in the doom. Only Joshua and Caleb were given permission to enter the land of that generation. The Lord said that Caleb would be allowed to enter the land because, Numbers 14, 24, he had a different spirit. The different spirit of Caleb is evident from his report about the land. He saw things differently. He and Joshua seemingly from a Peshat level, from a physical level, they had seen the same Canaanites. They had seen the same fortifications. They had seen the same fruits and bounty of the land. They had seen the same difficulties as the other ten. But they came to completely different conclusions. The other spy saw those things as obstacles, things to avoid, things that it would be better to be in Egypt than face. But Caleb and Joshua saw them as simply opportunities for God to demonstrate his glory in their midst. This was just an opportunity for God to demonstrate why he's God and how he'll be God. Because God said he will deliver this into our hands. Why should we doubt it? Look what he's done so far. Look at his track record. Why would we doubt it? So this is just a mere opportunity to see one more time how our God is God. Some people like to regard themselves as realists. And you may have heard someone say, I'm not a pessimist, I'm just a realist. Maybe you said that yourself. The inference, though, is that an optimistic person is not realistic. Accordingly, from this perspective, where only the pessimist is a realist, and the optimist is not a realist, the only honest and correct way to view reality and the world around you is simply by observing and pointing out its deficiencies, its difficulties, and all of the inevitable failures, all of the ways life stinks. That's not only not helpful, that's also not reasonable either. There are ways to look at life other than it stinks and it be real. There is nothing special about being pessimistic. Now, anyone can point out problems. Everyone can criticize. It takes no talent to be a naysayer. And maybe you know someone who is a rigid realist. But such a person is usually not realistic at all. Instead, a person like that demonstrates a tendency to emphasize the negative and always ignore the positive. Is that really realistic? There really is never a positive. And also, this personality tends to disregard the supernatural or the miraculous. To that person, answers to prayers are just mere coincidences. Words of encouragement are only irritating, and behind the veneer of cynicism is a life of dark self-absortion and self-pity. The Ten Spies were such realists. They assessed the situation in terms of their own reality, which was a faithless reality. From that perspective, things looked pretty dismal. A quick march back to Egypt was probably the best solution, because at least there you knew what was coming, you knew what was predictable, you had survived there, wasn't the greatest, but I mean you weren't going to get stepped on by Senephiline. Caleb and Joshua were a different kind of realist. To them, reality was not as big as their God. They assessed the situation in terms of a reality that encompassed faith. The difference between Caleb's spirit and the spirit of the ten spies is the difference between seeing life through the eyes of faith and seeing through the eyes that lacks faith. The optimist says the cup is half full, right? The pessimist says the cup is half empty, right? So it goes. But the person of faith gives thanks that the cup is half full and then marvels that God is either going to make the other half sufficient or is going to make That half cup sufficient to meet their needs, or it's going to miraculously fill the rest of the cup. That's where Caleb was. The cup is half full. Thank you, God, for letting it be half full. You're either going to make that half a cup be enough, or you're going to do something awesome where the cup's going to become full. So it isn't just that you see the cup half full. That wasn't Caleb. He saw it as more. People say every cloud has a silver lining, right? The optimist sees the silver lining, the pessimist sees the cloud. But the person of faith sees both the cloud and the silver lining. He gives thanks to his God, who made the cloud, who provides the rain, and also who clears the sky. This was the spirit of Caleb. This is how he was able to see differently, even though he saw the same exact thing. We've kind of talked about this before, where you can again have two people experience the same event or grow up in the same household, experience the same both triumphs and tragedies, and will tell you drastically different stories, right? And one is like this great person of faith and has this great testimony and it's on fire from God, and this other person's like the world stinks and everything's awful, right? And you're like, how? Because they did ext they do experience two worlds, they do see things completely differently. And how they see things and how they hear things does matter. It mattered for Caleb. Telling priorities, keep looking at Caleb here. Numbers chapter 13, verse 30. Caleb silenced the people regarding Moses, and he said, We shall surely go up and take possession of it, for we can indeed overcome it. So again, Moses sends spies to the land of Israel upon their return. 10 report, hey, we came to the land to which you sent us, and indeed it's flowing with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. You know, it's bountiful, it's amazing, right? However, the people who inhabit the land, they're mighty. They're Nephilim, they're giants, their cities are extremely huge and fortified. Right? And they go on and on. That point, Caleb interrupts them. He silences them, he doesn't let them finish. He silences the nation and assures them, we shall surely go up and take possession of it, for we can indeed overcome all of that. So why did Caleb interrupt the spies' report? Up until that point, they had spoken only about the richness of the land and the strength of its inhabitants, precisely what Moses had asked them to investigate, as we talked about facts. What did Caleb see in their words that already put him on the defensive, though? What Caleb noticed was that they did not report their findings in the same order as Moses' directives to them. And that's important. When you read the text, go back and read what Moses' orders are, and then read what they reported back to him as. That's significant in the story. And that's what gets Caleb upset. In this slight deviation, Caleb senses a fundamental difference of priorities between the spies and Moses. In other words, he understands that their sight is not the same as Moses' sight. Moses had said, See the land, what is it? Are the people who inhabit it strong or weak? Are they few or many? And what of the land they inhabit? Is it good or bad? The first thing he asked about was the strength of the land's inhabitants, because his primary concern was how to go about fulfilling God's instruction to conquer the land. The quality of the land was only of secondary importance and significance to Moses. The spies, however, spoke first about the benefits of the land. It showed what they saw first. It showed what they prioritized. It showed what their heart valued. And so they reported about it first, even though Moses wanted to know about it on a secondary level. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. And only afterward, about the challenging task of conquering it, did they lay that before them? Caleb realized immediately they were making a dreadful mistake. When a person is doing God's will but is primarily focused on the reward he or she will receive, their dedication to the task is determined by the benefit it will yield. Does the reward justify going to great lengths to fulfill this particular task or not? Should I roll up my sleeves and put in the effort? And when the task becomes defined by degrees of difficulty that they entail, it isn't long before a person can wrongly conclude that, well, maybe some of God's commands, well, they're simply too hard. They're too difficult, or they're impossible. You can see this many times when a person wants to dedicate themselves even to growing in the study of God's word and the understanding of God's word, the understanding of theology, right? And they want to roll up their sleeves and dig in, and then immediately they begin to be met with wow, this is bigger than I thought it was. This is more challenging than I thought it was. This goes deeper than I ever imagined it would. I don't know if this is worth it. Surely God doesn't want us doing this. And you quit because you don't see the reward being worth the effort. Because maybe you were focused on gaining the knowledge, becoming better at it, or something of that nature, focused on some kind of external reward rather than the spiritual growth. And so, as such, the spies finished sharing before they finished sharing their conclusions, Caleb knew he had to interrupt and protest because their vision did not match Moses and God's vision. They had a different spirit. And so Caleb stops them. But God, what will they think? Also, a nice secondary lesson here about going when we go to God and we pray to God. Um don't be afraid to challenge God. God, God encourages it. So Numbers 14, verses 2 through 3. Upon hearing the terrifying message of the 12 spies, the people panic, right? Ten of the 12, right? And they say, if only we had died in the land of Egypt, if only we might die in this wilderness. And God, that's when God says, okay. Why is the Lord taking us to the land to fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be carried off. It would be better for us to go back to Egypt. Given a choice between a difficult battle for freedom or an easy accommodation to slavery, the Israelites choose slavery. They choose the known. Dysfunctional though it may be, harmful it may be to them and their family, they at least know it. They at least develop the survival techniques, they at least have the coping mechanisms for it. It's at least the known world for them. Why venture out into this fearful, nebulous promised land of freedom that maybe they don't believe really exists? So when given the choice to leave it all behind and all of the slavery and all of the bondage and all of the dysfunction and all of the danger and embrace freedom, they choose slavery. And not much has changed in the past 3,000 years. Given the choice between a difficult struggle to change our way of living, our greed, our addictions, our pride, our callousness, our bigotry, in the end, most will choose the slavery of materialism, the slavery of convention, the slavery of conformity, the slavery of, at least I know the terrain. No gain, maybe, but also no risk. But God, however, well, to put it mildly, is furious, and he threatens to destroy the people instantly. Because a rejection of freedom is a rejection of God. Only after a passionate argument with Moses does God finally back down. He agrees to forgive the people. Yes, that generation outside of Caleb and Joshua and their families is going to perish, but their children and their descendants will see the promised land. They're forgiven, and their children, the next generation, will experience the promised land. But even then, God does exact a penalty. They ask to die in the wilderness, and that's where they'll die. Later commentators have been troubled by Moses' logic. At first, in the Midrash, it tells us that Moses tries arguing the merits of the people and their ancestors, but God isn't interested in hearing that. So then Moses shifts his argument and he asks God instead, hey, God, when the Egyptians, from whose midst you have brought up this people, when they hear the news, and this is something Moses does in the Torah on more than one occasion, what are they going to say? What are they going to say? When the nations see you obliterate this people, what are they going to say about you? What is your reputation going to be? Moses is basically saying, hey God, you ain't no better than Pharaoh. When you don't like how things go, this is what Pharaoh would do. Pharaoh would just make them slaves, or worse, he would just kill them. Like you're behaving, you'd be behaving like Pharaoh. What would the nations say about you? What would your reputation be? Is it possible that God backs down because of what the Gentiles and the nations might think of him? Perhaps we can learn from Moses' argument. The people who had been given freedom were on the brink of rejecting it. The nation that had been taught a sacred and just way of living were about to choose slavery, hierarchy, and oppression. If God responded the way Pharaoh would have in the face of a slave rebellion, wouldn't that response vindicate Pharaoh and the values that Pharaoh represented? See what Moses is doing with God? What Moses was telling God was that the final lesson of freedom and responsibility couldn't be imposed by threats, couldn't be imposed by the methods of the pharaohs of the world, because that would only produce more pharaohs and more Egypts, more places, sure, of great wealth, but also of stifling poverty and places that treated people like cattle and reduced the sacred to empty form. In other words, hey God, if you really want to change the world and prove you're different, your response has got to be different. And instead of force, it's got to be mercy. It's got to be forgiveness, it's got to be grace. And Moses was right. And God knew it. The battle for freedom constantly threatens to collapse, both because of its enemies, but also because of its would-be advocates. When we defend our freedoms by diminishing someone else's humanity, then Pharaoh wins. When we defend our freedoms by labeling someone else and intrinsically evil them over there, where we are the always good us, Pharaoh wins. And when we impose habit and conformity in order to stifle the really important questions or punish people for their differences, we're in the danger of driving God from our midst. God forgives. And of course, we most importantly see this dramatic shift through the Son of God and our Messiah and the power of forgiveness. God forgives because the Egyptians would look and see something different. Because if God did not forgive, they would then, the Egyptians, feel vindicated in all of their narrowness and in all of their actions, and all of their willingness to squash the other. After all, if God does it, why can't they? Not only the people of Israel, but God stood at a crossroad here. To use the methods of Pharaoh would simply have been to become a new Pharaoh. And I think that's something amazing. When you really look, you can do it with Moses, you can do it with Abraham as well. Like when Abraham debates with God about, you know, if you find 50 righteous men, will you are you really going to destroy this town? What are people going to what if what if there's 50 good people here? Will you destroy it? Right? 40, 30, 20, right? Gets down to essentially, will you save it for even for one? Which shows that even for the sake of one righteous, God will save the many, pointing again to our Messiah. So God here forgives in order to transcend Pharaoh. You cannot teach freedom by fiat, and you cannot bring people to the promised land through force. There is no them, there is only us when we are journeying towards the freedom that God has given to us and Messiah. And so God forgives to transcend and to transform and to show the nation that He is not another Pharaoh, and He is not another God, but that He is the God of all gods and the one who forgives, the one who extends mercy, and the one who, when He says you are my people, He means you are my people. He keeps covenant to the thousandth of generations. All right, we will close there for this evening as we finish up portion Shelach, an idea and the connection of hearing and seeing and all of those beautiful things that we looked at from many different angles this evening. We will continue looking at the Torah next week, I believe next week's portion, portion 38, is, if I'm not mistaken, portion Korach. And Korach, again, normal sight has a legitimate beef. But different sight, maybe not so legitimate. But so we'll look at Korach next week. Let's close with the blessing. Baruchatah Adunai Notein Hadara. Blessed are you, Lord God, who has given to us the gift that is the Torah. Amen. Shlom Shlom. Go in peace. Hi everyone. Thank you for engaging this teaching. You know, we at Emanuel have as one of our goals to make our teachings available online to anyone, everywhere, at any time, whether that's through a podcast or our YouTube channel or an MP3 download. It is our gift to you, and we want you to use it however you see fit. Also, if you feel motivated or desire to support future teachings, you can do so with the donate button at the bottom of our teaching page. That's found at immlutheran.org forward slash teaching. Again, thank you for participating in our teachings here, and hope to see you or engage with you somehow, some way, somewhere.